Tuesday, 23 September 2008

How am I doing It?

The Leverhulme Trust remit is for me to to interact and contribute. This generously open brief offers a great freedom and flexibility and is welcome after the public performative role of running of the Children's Art Studio at North Edinburgh Arts Centre. Occasionally it can feel disorientatingly open, especially when everyone else here at CRFR has a focussed brief for research and outcomes.

The give and take of it all at the moment is that on the giving side I am open to collaborative possibilities as they arise and I will continue the drawing sessions and start new lunchtime art sessions in the autumn term.

On the taking side I am having the opportunity to reflect on my practice. A reading of Art Encounters Deleuze and Guttari, Thought Beyond Representation, by Simon O'Sullivan, is useful for this:

'We might say then, that art practice names the careful process by which within a striated space (organised, regimented and representational) a smooth space is opened up....It is here that the 'in-between' nature of art practice again becomes important. Art is always situated between the actual and the virtual, in fact we might say operates itself as a kind of 'actualising machine' p34

This resonates with where Caroline and I are in our conceptualising of what we are doing in our collaboration. What started as a consideration of how best to 'present' or 'represent' her Phd findings has shifted or evolved. We are now thinking that the 'process' and the 'production' are inclusively about 'creating (creative) spaces for exploratory and critical dialogue'. This then resonates with Sarah Morton's evolving sense of generating 'impact' with research. She is considering the potential for each stage of the research process to generate 'impact' and for that 'impact' to be cumulative.

Another quote from Art Encounters delineating art practice could equally apply to this way of thinking research:'..An art practice is a fluid, dynamic system always in connection with a number of different regimes and registers and always in contact with an outside, however that is theorised....in this sense, art is less the name for an object or a discipline as such but again a name for a function of 'deterritorialisation' - an affective 'moving away from the habitual'.